From The Mana World
Revision as of 12:04, 29 January 2007 by Pauan (talk | contribs) (Added in replies to Dave's comments.)

22:35, 28 January 2007 (CET)


THE WORLD MAP

~the best of both worlds ;)


Centralcontinent-pauan-dabe.jpg

Since multiple starting locations seem to be unnecessary, at least until the game matures somewhat, Pauan and I devised a solution with a central 'island' continent, where everyone would start.

To keep the starting area isolated, we let the backstory dictate our actions. There is a reference to the gods being forced in to the center of the world, the point at which energy gathers to be recycled. When this happened, there was a tremendous explosion of energy, which scarred the face of the world. This is the world that we should be attempting to portray.

The map that we started making however, was not complete. As the idea had been to focus on the central starting location, we still had the rest of the surrounding continents to draw. It seems logical enough, that we should merge the two map ideas, since one seems to compliment the other so adequately. I feel that the central continent that Pauan and I developed, fits nicely in the basic form of Modanung's idea. It was to be the smallest of the main continents, almost an island by comparison.

Map modanung-pauan-dabe.jpg

The central island continent is like a miniature ecosystem in itself, having its own apparent poles with extreme variations in climate, over a small amount of area. In-game, this island continent can act as a natural barrier between the players and the rest of the world, until we're ready to open spots for exploration. Gradually unveiling methods of travel to the other continents will also be easier with this idea, since you will need some special means of travel to leave.

I have something to submit for travel off of the central continent, should it be required.. and I hope it is.

This also helps to bolster the need for something like the "Sea of Dissonace" - the central continent could lie in the middle of these deadly waters; another example of a natural defense that sometimes acts as a double edged sword.

If all of this is agreeable, we can regrid the map so that the body of water on the central continent is the epicenter of the world. I also have an idea for the edge of the world, if we're still going for a flat-world situation.

I have something to note. Um, yes, I am in agreement with this idea, but I think the middle continent will need to be reworked to have it fit in with the rest. I have no problem with doing that. Also, I do NOT agree with the flat-world idea. No point to it really. Why not have the world as a sphere, but then add a back-story about WHY the central continent is like a mini-planet? It could even be a beginning quest, before the rest of the continents are finished: Find out the reason for the peculiar island we are currently on. Perhaps it could have been artificially made. Perhaps there exists a wormhole which is causing a parallel universe within the current planet! As said, I think that would work far better rather than just saying, "The world is flat. Deal with it." Lastly, a sphere-like world would do FAR better if we allow personal transportation one day. Indeed I think a sphere-world would work far better overall and we have no good reason to make the world flat aside from the fact we want to defy all the laws of physics. :) One other thing, if I ever end up learning Blender I can do both a rasterized and 3-d map. The rasterized one is obviously good for many things, including production, and the 3-d one would add nice touches like expanding on the exact terrain found within the rastered map. -- Pauan 13:04, 29 January 2007 (CET)





THE RACES, THE ELEMENTS and GAME MECHANICS

~a racial system or something more customizable?


The reason I became dissatisfied with the racial system that I proposed, is because I have a feeling that after a while, it will become boring. It just feels too rigid. In order to be aligned to a certain element, you have to choose a certain race. In order to have certain innate abilities, you have to choose a certain race. All of this aside, there were disagreements and problems with the races. The whole animal-feature idea is great, but I think we should be more modular with our approach to character creation.

Instead of having 8 races, with each attached to a distinct appearance, we could use a system of traits to add detail to characters; let the player choose their appearance from a set of modular values (head, skin-tone, etc) after they build their character.

That way, if they choose something like flippers, it can be a forced overlay graphic on the character's feet. So even if they're allowed to wear boots, their bare-feet will have flipper graphics on top of them.

What if you don't want to look like a fishperson, but want to be water-based? Or maybe you do want to look like a fishperson, but don't want to be water-based?

That's my thought process on how we can probably do better.

Allowing people to choose traits to detail their characters will offer much more flexibility to the creation process. Any racial feature that we had in mind for the proposed racial system can be offered, but we can allow players to put them to use in to a variety of different packages, which actually does better suit the community appeal, as well as the evolutionary aspect of the story.

We could still use the races, actually. Make them like templates or presets when you're building your character. Custom can be a choice for those who wish to build a character more to their exacting specifications.

Whatever the case with the system ends up being, the 8-element system was a disagreeable idea. TIME, SPACE, LIGHT and DARK were all in some way difficult to place in terms of magical categorization, animal and environmental features (it was hard to apply animals to SPACE and LIGHT, and hard to apply environments to TIME and DARK, to put it simply)

Back when I was initially bothered by this, I came up with an outline for a system that would apply four elements as attributes, alongside STRENGTH, AGILITY, etc.. It was inspired by the World of Darkness series and Fallout's "SPECIAL" system.

Instead of having one category of attributes like most games tend toward, we could break them up in to three categories, like this:

   - BODY:  strength
            dexterity
            agility
            charisma
   - MIND:  will
            intuition
            perception
            luck
   - SOUL:  fire
            air
            water
            earth

The character creation process is a perfect set of examples to explain how a system like this might work. You start a new character and are asked to distribute points to the above mentioned attributes. After doing that, you would be asked to choose from a list of traits. These traits are all made available given you meet their prerequisites. Your attributes could still be used to formulate derived scores, such as SPEED and ENDURANCE.

Traits can be anything from physical features to personality quirks. Many have small drawbacks to accept for their benefits. It's a matter of flavor. Again with flippers as an example, maybe the flippers make you walk a bit slower on land, but in exchange, you move with much more speed and grace in the water, than a person without flippers would. Claws could be a good example, as well. Maybe you can't equip weapons, but your claws grow with you. (not in size, but in damage.. ;)

There are many more examples that I have, as well as can be derived from the wiki, which many have already contributed to. These published ideas for abilities and other character features, can be applied to a trait system, ensuring that a good portion of those ideas will have some use.

Abilities would probably be best used with percentage scores.. getting them to function is easy enough, it'd just be a matter of compiling an extensive enough list of abilities to implement. You could do some similar categorization with the abilities if you wanted. Break them up in to skill, knowledge and talent.. or something like that. It'd be a way to categorize abilities for things like a % bonus. Like if you for some reason, gained more for spending points on knowledges than you did on talents. Something like that could be applied to the attributes as well. In World of Darkness, they make you decide which is your primary, secondary and tertiary of your attribute and ability categories.. This ranking determines how many points you will have to distribute in each category. I don't think this is necessary, but it's an option to consider with this overall idea. Regardless of any ranking of the categories, each should probably have its own pool of points.

Proposal: Change the term "soul" to "spirit," since that is essentially what it would be. Also, I agree that this idea if far nicer. Even if the majority of water-breathers were affiliated with the water element, that does not mean there will not be exceptions. As such you can be BORN into the water race and yet not be affiliated with the water element per se. So I agree with this idea pretty much 100%. One other thing, we will need to decide JUST how many elements we want. 4-8 sounds good, with 6 being an average. For now 4 doesn't sound too bad though and personally I think 8 is excessive. It will be harder to balance things out the more elements we have, so better to keep it simple and understandable. -- Pauan 13:04, 29 January 2007 (CET)

I'm just trying to think of a way to tie all of these somewhat incompatible ideas together, in to something that not only we can agree on, but that will actually function. This is a horrible, disorganized mess of ideas, but there's just so much to tackle when you look at the big picture. I almost feel like I should set the game mechanic outline aside as an eventual fork. Even if it's a good idea, changes seem to be hard to bring about in terms of general game direction.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure how far this "world cleanup" is supposed to reach, but I would imagine that game mechanics comes in to play somewhere, since it doesn't seem to be anything with much of a foundation behind it at the moment. If by some magical process, everyone who matters agrees with these general ideas, I might be able to get another system proposal put together, that we actually CAN use. All chocked full of balanced progression math, diagrams, tables, flowcharts, etc..

I'm pretty sure no one is ready for these kind of changes though, so I'm going to put it all here on my discussion page for rambling purposes. Please read and comment to your heart's desire. I have a general idea for how I think the game mechanics should work for a game like this, but I know it's difficult to just adopt someone else's entire perspective on how something should be. If anyone ever needed an idea for a fork with different game mechanics, this might be good for a TMW variant. (something with a similar idea, but executed differently)

It could work with any battle system, that is.. real-time/action battle or point-and-click/engaged battle.


I am quite ready for these kinds of changes, but I guess my opinion doesn't matter. ;D -- Pauan 13:04, 29 January 2007 (CET)


random notes

I really think some of you that are concerned with developing a good game system, should check out Fallout, if you've never played it. The system they developed for that game was made to replace GURPS as a foundation. It takes in to account, many of the things that seem to be desired from what I can read on the wiki. They call the system SPECIAL.. which stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck.

Just something to think about, when you have nothing better to do.

I'm glad you've bothered to read this, no matter your opinion of what I've discussed here.. thanks! :D